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Hi Everyone,
Why does Daylight Savings Time have to begin during the busiest time of life on the farm? I cannot tell you if I am exhausted from farming or from a time change. Here on the farm our days are long enough, I do not need an extra hour at night time to work---because trust me, we will use it. I prefer the sun coming up early---because our day starts at 6:00 every morning no matter what (well, almost every morning-Saturday’s it is 7:00, and Sunday’s it is 5:00). Give it a few more weeks though, and the sun will be rising before 7:00 anyway. For now we are up before dawn, and working till sunset.
Here a little, there a little, everywhere a little, little. That is exactly the way we spent our day on Monday. Mom and I got the cows milked first thing in the morning. Then Steve weeded around the new Poultry Kitchen---fireweed had taken over in mass, and we had a crew coming on Thursday to start putting in the electrical and plumbing. I am sure that they didn’t want any close encounters with a weed that causes your skin to sting like fire for hours after you brush up against it. Mom and I came along to help with the weeding, but first off we stopped to weed the Missouri wild orange lily bed behind the feed room. When the weeding was done, I headed to the garden and our stash pile of farm supplies in looks for cattle panels and hog panels and any other wire device to be used for trellises in the garden. I counted up six 6ft by 7ft tall trellises and four cattle panels that are 4ft by 16ft that I could bend in half to make a tunnel trellis. The trellises help to conserve space in the garden by growing certain vegetables vertically instead of horizontally. I plan on growing Christmas lima beans, green lima beans, Noodle beans, acorn squash, butternut squash, spaghetti squash, cucumbers and cantaloupe on the trellises. When I got back inside I made yogurt, we ate lunch, fed the lambs their bottles and I finished mapping out the garden plots on paper. I had to know what to plant where and when. I was grateful to realize that the whole garden did not need to be planted on Thursday and Friday. Some could be planted this week, and then the rest on April 11.
As I sit here I am able to see out across the pastures---and I have been watching my Great Pyrenes dog, Sheba, chase her tail and when she catches it she rolls and rolls around. Sheba is a very sweet dog, and loves to get attention. At the same time she is a very loyal chicken guard. Our other guard dog, Jill, lets her chickens roam far and wide, but Sheba doesn’t let her chickens roam too far away. In the last month since Sheba turned two, she has begun a very bad habit---and since she lives in the pastures by herself I am not too sure how to fix the problem. Great Pyrenes are known to dig holes, but Sheba must have a strong desire to see what a Chinaman looks like---for certainly she is digging to China as they say. Her holes are tunnels that go a good six feet or more underground---and she can dig them in one day. The bad part is that she and her chickens are moved to a new pasture everyday as they follow the cows and sheep around the farm. That means that every field is being decorated by a Sheba trench.
Tuesday we got the milking done and the milk and kefir bottled and then we headed to the garden. I will admit that I only have one goal on my mind lately---getting the garden prepared and planted. That means that I chose to let the calves stay on their mothers so that I would not have to cream the milk---it takes two hours from setup to cleanup and I wanted to spend those two hours in the garden. Sorry all you cream lovers, but sometimes the great outdoors beckons loudly--especially when spring is in the air. Once we arrived in the garden there were plenty of weeds to be eradicated, and fed to the compost chickens. Those chickens are doing a wonderful job turning our food scraps and weeds into nice rich loamy compost. When you walk in their compost yard, the ground underneath is soft and spongy. The only problem is figuring out how to utilize that compost, for there are sticks and roots that we do not want to put in the garden. I have seen a compost sifter, but haven’t found anyone to build me one yet. Once some of the beds were weeded of all the big weeds, Steve took the tiller in and turned it all to dirt. While some of our beds are set up for the no-till style of gardening, some still require tilling to make them usable. While so many people teach against tilling, I have to say that when it is necessary I am perfectly fine with it---for when you read in the Bible, that is exactly how they managed their fields in order to plant their crops. I can guarantee you though that they did not till as deep as people can do today with the large tractors, and neither do we till very deep with our little tiller. By 5:00 we had gotten all the beds that I needed to plant on Thursday and Friday “weed free”, but we still needed to build all the trellises, mark out the beds, and put fresh compost in the beds where we want to plant. Time was up though, and it was time for Steve to go home. I moaned for I realized that the rest would have to be done by just Mom and I. I had hoped to get all the heavy work done while Steve was here to do it--- we sure do miss Eli’s help.
It is March and that means that Spring break has arrived---which means that many of our customers take a vacation. Therefore, it did not take very long to pack the Jacksonville order. Then I sat down to teach my students their piano lessons. When I was done with the last one she asked if she could please help us feed the bottle lambs---with six lambs to feed, you do not turn down any offer for help. Charla helped me fix the bottles then Mom joined us as we headed out to feed the lambs. While we were feeding them, Steve had finished his chores and came to get his paycheck from Mom (she had it in her pocket). Then he left to go home. We finished feeding the lambs, and got up to leave---but the door would not open. When Steve had left, he locked the door behind him. There was a board in the way of the latch, so we couldn’t slip the hook off of the eye bolt. We had a good laugh and sat down to play with the lambs while we waited for the rest of Charla’s family to come outside to go home. We only had to wait about twenty minutes. Later that afternoon Mom and I had to chase some calves down. You see---they go right underneath the hot wire (we need two strands, but Papa has not had the time to string the second wire) and then out into the yard (because the fence was taken down to build the new Poultry Barn, and we haven’t had time to install a new fence). Most of the calves stay in, but one calf is a renegade and she has a side kick. Little Mabel is the renegade and she takes after her mother Ellie Mae. When Ellie Mae was young, my sisters came in many a day declaring that we should take that cow to the auction because they were tired of chasing her from one end of the 65 acres to the other. She would never stay behind the wires. Today she is an excellent cow and is the most faithful cow to come when you call her---and she comes in a quick trot. Anyway, as I said, the renegades name is Mabel, and her sidekicks name is Cy. Maybe their names should be Bonnie and Clyde.
Thursday morning our electrical and plumbing crew arrived around 8:15. Our dear friends (the Cranes) are starting up their own business, and I guess that you could say that we are some of their first customers-----though they have done this work for years. The three boys are very hard workers; their father has taught them well. While the Dad started in on the electrical, the boys began to dig the trench to run the electricity from the house to the Milk house and then to the Poultry Kitchen. The Milk house electric had to be done over, because the last electrician did a poor job. The ditch digging crew were the best we have ever seen---no complaining as they hit clay. They were determined and pressed on. When we were having our house built, two crews walked off the job of digging the footers because of the clay. My Uncle who builds homes in Missouri and Illinois just laughed, because clay and rock are what they deal with in every house he builds. Here in Florida the earth is made up mostly of sand, but here on our farm we have a healthy amount of clay. Healthy when it comes to growing things, but aggravating when you are digging a hole to plant a tree or digging a trench to bury a pipe.
While the Crane crew worked on electrical and plumbing, Mom and I were busy with other things. First we got the cows milked and then Moises had to help me filter the milk while Mom headed to town to go to the bank and to pick up another batch of broiler chicks from the Post Office. For a little while I helped Moises wash the milking equipment so that he could get done and Travis (the Dad of the Crane Crew) could turn off the electric. Then I gathered up all the panels and trellises and hooked them on the back of the Gravely, and then Papa helped me get t-posts and the dirt to the garden, while I drug the panels and trellises out there. I started to measure out the garden beds for the green beans, but before I got too far Mom was home and it was time to eat lunch and feed the bottle lambs. After that Mom and I headed back to the garden and we got the green bean beds measured off and covered with a layer of compost. Then we twisted the compost into the garden dirt, leveled it off and planted two rows of Blue Lake bush green beans to each of the five rows. Next we prepared the cantaloupe bed by finishing up the weeding in the bed and installing the trellis for them to grow up. We put cardboard down under the trellis---since we will not be able to get back there to weed it. Then Mom put the compost in and we planted the Noir des Carme cantaloupe--a yummy cantaloupe that grows green, and then turns yellowy orange when it is ripe. Since we have a hard time telling when melons are ripe, it is nice when they turn colors when ripe. This year I am growing a watermelon that turns yellow when it is ripe. It is called a Golden Midget. We also managed to finish installing the trellis for the Suyo long cucumbers, and then we planted the seeds. That is all that we managed to plant, because we ran out of time and Mom was running out of energy. Poor Mom has started with her new doctor, and for two weeks she can eat no grain, no dairy (even Butter), and no eggs. She can eat meat and most vegetables, and she is supposed to eat every three hours. We live on a farm and the work load is too heavy to not be eating any carbs, and we do not have a chef (like Justin Rhodes) who can cook all our meals, and it is hard enough for us to figure out what to eat three times a day—every three hours is impossible. Breakfast is the hardest meal, and vegetables do not taste the same in olive oil as they do in good ole delicious butter. Thankfully the diet is for only two weeks, and then she can add some things back in, but how to survive for two weeks is the problem.
Friday was a repeat of Thursday, but with a little twist. The Crane crew was back, and this time they were digging a trench to connect the water to the building. We knew that the waterline came up the drive way from the woods, but we could have sworn that it came up the middle of the driveway. They dug and dug and dug---thankfully they had pick axes to get through the clay. Much digging was spent on trying to find the pipe---was it deeper than two feet, had we passed it, or had we not reached it. Mom and Papa helped poke and dig, hoping to find the pipe soon. Around 3:00 in the afternoon they had finally dug all the way across the yard and found the water pipe---I am sure that there was a loud cheer. They had hoped to have all the electrical strung in the building by the end of the day, but with half the crew busy digging all day, they didn’t get as far as expected.
In the garden Mom and I were busy doing our own manual labor---getting our own suntans and blisters. After I installed all the markers for each bed, and smoothed out the walkway, then we installed two tunnel trellises---and I do not know how to explain that it was a challenge and a half, but we did accomplish it. One trellis was made out of a demolished chicken hoop house. That meant that two cattle panels that are 4ft by 16ft each, were wired together in the middle. Maneuvering them around was pretty awkward and heavy. Although exhaustion had arrived, we filled up three beds with the compost and planted some Dragon’s egg cucumbers on one trellis, and some dill and patty pan squash. We did not get as much planted as I had wanted to , but I comforted myself in knowing that they could wait until next month, and then we would have four more weeks to get things prepared.
Saturday was catch up day---as in catch up on sleep, rest and relaxation. Yet, at the same time there were cows to milk, orders to pack, laundry to fold, clothes to iron, piano to practice and kombucha to make. When that was all done I ran out to the garden to harvest some carrots and a cabbage to cook with some onions, celery and chicken legs for dinner.
This week looks to be just as busy---the challenge will be prioritizing everything to the most beneficial to everyone and everything.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare